Your guide to the new Denis Coderre
The former mayor is taking another crack at the top job. But how much has he changed?
To understand Denis Coderre's return to municipal politics, there are three things you should know:
One, he believes he lost the 2017 mayoral election to Valérie Plante not because Montrealers sided with her vision for the city's future but because the election was "a referendum on my personality."
And, by his own admission in an interview Tuesday, he had become overly arrogant and combative by the end of his term.
Two, Coderre believes Montreal is in worse state now than when he left office, despite steady GDP growth and job growth ahead of the pandemic.
He feels the downtown core has lost its vitality. He worries about the exodus of families to the suburbs and bemoans the polarized debates over issues like bike paths.
"We are," he said, "losing the Montreal experience."
Three, as a self-styled "radical centrist" he believes that on every pressing social issue facing the city, from policing to social housing, compromise is possible.
If you buy Coderre's argument that it was about his personality, you'll want to know if he's changed.
If you buy his claims that Montreal is worse off without him, you'll want to know what he'd do differently.
But that information may be no more than passing interest unless you align with him on the concept of compromise.
A new man?
In several recent interviews, Coderre has spoken openly about the personal difficulties he faced around the end of his term, and how he recovered from them.
The more pressing question, as he gets set to take over the opposition party Ensemble Montreal, is whether he has changed as a politician.
Coderre says the answer is yes; he's more willing to listen now.
Well before his loss in 2017, he was routinely criticized for his my-way-or-the-highway approach.
The best-known example is the fiasco over Formula E, the electric car race he insisted on having through parts of downtown to celebrate Montreal's 375th birthday.
During the last campaign, he maintained the race had been a success, though sales figures would later prove otherwise.
"That was a mistake," he said. "I paid for it. And I apologize for the mistake I made."
The blame he's willing to accept, though, is limited.
An investigation into the event by Montreal's inspector general concluded in 2018 that Coderre's office ignored repeated warnings from the city's own lawyers, who were worried about the legality of creating a non-profit organization to host the race.
Coderre denies he received the warnings, or that there were any governance issues with how his administration organized the race.
WATCH | Denis Coderre on his return to municipal politics
Coderre, the policy wonk
It's a topic he is keen to move on from. He has, after all, just written a 300-page book that outlines his vision for Montreal's future.
It is at times vague and heavy on Coderre's well-worn cliches — the hit parade includes the classics "walking and chewing gum at the same time" and "governing is choosing."
But on certain topics the book offers specific policy proposals that indicate what his campaign platform might look like come the fall.
Take for instance, the nexus of issues around urban density and affordable housing for families.
Coderre argues the province should transfer responsibility for primary and secondary school infrastructure to the city.
With the ability to decide where to build schools, he says, Montreal could generate more family-friendly neighbourhoods.
He also proposes delaying property-tax increases for people on fixed incomes, as a way of limiting dislocations from gentrification.
Revitalizing the downtown would happen through tax cuts for businesses and developing smaller commercial spaces for retailers whose transactions occur mainly online.
"All those things together will create a vibrant downtown. And not only for downtown, but for every district of the city," he said.
The big difference
Of the various big-city problems that Montreal faces, there are few Coderre believes can't be solved by "talking about it," or "working together" or "sitting at the discussion table."
He is hardly the first politician to present dialogue as a way to make seemingly intractable problems appear solvable.
But with Coderre, it also hints at the ideological conviction he carries toward governing, and what may be the major difference with Plante.
Coderre is sharply critical of how the current administration has often built bike paths over the objections of motorists and business owners.
He doesn't oppose the idea of bike paths but he does say they should be built in collaboration of other stakeholders.
"They need to be accompanied. You can't impose it on them," he said.
When pushed, though, he was unable to come up with a convincing plan for how to build a bike path along a major artery without angering merchants.
Coderre also vows to repeal Montreal's affordable housing bylaw, which, when it comes into effect next month, will force large developers to either include affordable units in a project or contribute to a municipal housing fund.
Interfering in the real-estate market, he writes in his book, will drive up prices and antagonize developers.
"If developers are not part of the discussion, do you think they'll be willing to build anything?" he said in the interview.
One of the reasons, though, that the city is dealing with a severe shortage of social housing is that the private sector has consistently failed to provide enough rental units for low-income Montrealers.
With social housing, as with bike paths and a number of other issues, the Plante administration showed itself unwilling to wait for consensus to emerge.
For better or worse, it determined the delivery of these public goods was sufficiently urgent to warrant privileging some concerns over others.
This question about how to deliver public goods will loom large in the campaign this fall, regardless whether Coderre has changed or not.
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